How About Gratitude?

By Abe Greenwald

Tuesday, February 04, 2025

 

The State of the Nation Project just released its national progress report. The group, made up of diverse think-tank scholars and former presidential advisers, describes the report as a “comprehensive and objective” assessment of “how we are doing as a country.” The big takeaway is this: “We are near the top in the world, among high-income countries, on economic measures but near the bottom on measures related to mental health, citizenship and democracy, inequality, and violence, as well as for measures of greenhouse gas emissions and some children/family measures.”

 

Bradley Birzer of Hillsdale College spoke to the New York Times about the report, saying, “We’re so wealthy but so unhappy.” But why?

 

The report itself doesn’t venture explanations or solutions, but the Times spoke with some of its authors, who laid out five possible causes: 1. The U.S. is hyper-focused on economic growth at the expense of well-being; 2. Americans are spending too much time alone; 3. Inequality is unbearably high; 4. We’ve become enervated by the trappings of affluence; 5. The country has suffered a string of destabilizing upheavals over the past few years. 

 

There’s a great deal of truth to some of these claims and less to others. But none of them gets at the massive and invisible circumstance fostering our unhappiness: Americans are not as grateful as they once were for the blessings of their country. It’s a sorry state that we’ve been conditioned into. 

 

In classrooms, children are instructed in historic American evils, climate doom, and the relative goodness of other cultures. Worse, they’ve now been taught not to be grateful for their healthy bodies but to be suspicious of them, as they may be of the wrong sex. Higher education, with its comprehensive miscellany of postmodern theories, has become a factory for scholars of ingratitude. 

 

Once you’re in the adult world, contempt for the country is reinforced constantly. Every popular activist cause is an anti-American cause. And each one gets a polished defense in legacy media. Politicians harp on what a short distance the nation has come on this or that issue (until they showed up and fixed things). And there’s little relief in popular entertainment. Television and movie villains are no longer foreign terrorists but bigoted Americans or the U.S. government. 

 

There’s a canon of sins we are meant to internalize. We’re told our food is poison instead of a miracle of abundance. We’re told that Big Pharma is killing us, even as a revolution in semaglutides, tirzepatides, and other weight-loss drugs may herald the end of morbid obesity. (Think about that: We have enough affordable food to spawn an obesity epidemic and a successful enough pharmacology sector to potentially end it.) We’re told our democracy is in peril when it’s the longest continually functioning such system in the world. We’re told the climate is perilously unstable, while the Earth is in a moderate cycle that began almost 12,000 years ago. We’re told that economic inequality is the scourge of our time when Americans in every economic bracket have more in material goods and resources than in any other age. We’re told the rest of the world hates us when we have a migrant crisis at our border. We’re told our neighbors are racist when polls show Americans have never been less bigoted and are among the least racist people on the planet.

 

If you walk around with that nonsense in your head, why would you be happy? 

 

In another era, widespread religious instruction instilled gratitude in Americans from a young age, connecting one’s good fortune to a transcendent God. But religion is on a long steep decline. There’s a wellness trend that now tries to teach gratitude by rote, instructing people to make daily gratitude lists. In fact, while real gratitude is vanishing, “gratitude” is everywhere. It’s one of those social-media signaling words like “blessed” or “humbled” that really mean their opposite. 

 

The opposite of gratitude is entitlement. And we’re awash in it. If you believe you live in a bad country, then you may also believe you’re entitled to something better. Only you won’t find it. The U.S. faces a host of serious challenges, but if you’re reading this in the United States in the year 2025, this is as good as it gets. It’s as good as it’s ever gotten. Go talk to someone who lived through a truly punishing period of our history or under a truly bad regime. If you’re still not grateful, have the decency to be humbled.